Double Hedda

In New York, Henrik Ibsen's centennial is celebrated with a knockout showdown: It's Cate Blanchett vs. the robots, for the soul of Hedda Gabler.

“Ibsen was an important writer because he liberated women from years of doing chores. This made many people unhappy, because who was going to do the chores now? What’s funny is that people keep doing his plays even though now women are free.”—Nugget, Heddatron

The housewife—desperate, Stepford, triple-X or otherwise—is a key figure in today’s culture wars. She is the locus for a hundred different anxieties about life in the twenty-first century, from changing gender roles to the shaky status of the nuclear family to the eternal friction between social conventions and individual subjectivities. Since Lisa Belkin of The New York Times Magazine raised eyebrows and red flags with her story on successful women who “opt out” of the professional world in favor of Gymboree sessions and time with the Barefoot Contessa, it seems that every week sees the publication of yet another article breathlessly analyzing the condition of the modern housewife. (See “

But the promise of subtle, insightful Ibsen revisions is not why, weeks before Heddatron opened, Collision Detection blog was already declaring it “the best play in the history of the universe.” (“Hedda Gable! Acted by Robots” 2 February 2006) About halfway through this 90-minute one act, two visitors arrive in Jane’s living room. They are Hans and Billy, and they are robots. Not actors in robot costumes, mind you, but real, live robots. “Turn around, Jane,” they intone. “I am an enormously large robot and I am also a large poet,” says Hans. “Turn around Jane. Bump, bump, what’s that? That’s my robot heart beating itself to death inside my rock hard torso-tron. Turn around, Jane. Turn around and look, look at all of this stuff piling up around you. My penal shaft is enormous. It is also metal. This is the moment, this is exactly the moment.” It may read goofy on the page, but after 45 minutes of happy stage cacophony, the slow, mechanical bleeps are eerily moving, and the robots’ flat, awkward come-ons have some of the strange and dreamy power of Radiohead’s “Fitter, Happier”.

Hans and Billy spirit Jane away to the forests of Ecuador, where they force her to perform in their all-robot revue of Hedda Gabler. There, amid the vine leaves, Jane experiences a brief, rapturous moment of something. The precise connection between Jane and the robots or, for that matter, Jane and Heddam is tenuous and doesn’t bear too much scrutiny. Perhaps the robots are drawn to Jane because they are each, the living woman and the automatons, caught up in their own experience of singularity: “the moment,” an engineer explains in the play, “when robots will break out of the network of communications and achieve self-awareness.”

Watching Heddatron isn’t unlike the experience of reading Hedda Gabler for the first time: one gets flashes of insight, makes momentary synaptic connections. None of the play’s tantalizing ideas are ever fleshed out into anything resembling a thesis, and not all the connections are explored logically (is a woman in 2006 really like a toaster?) A side story involving Ibsen’s “kitchen slut”, Else (Julie Lake)—who recounts a horrifically, comically, over-the-top tale of rape at one point, and at another brightly asks her master if he wants to “put it inside” her—is so disturbing and jarring that I kept wondering when the narrative would resolve or explain itself. It doesn’t, and in the end, Heddatron leaves us with a lot more questions than answers. But then, maybe we should be celebrating that. In response to Hedda Gabler‘s ineffable, sprawling mysteries, Les Freres offered us something just as messy and fascinating, with some robot sweeteners to make it go down easy. Or, in the final words of Nugget’s school report:

“Maybe the day you saw it was just a bad day. Maybe you’re a stupid person. I don’t know why Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler. But maybe that’s the point. Hedda doesn’t want to be understood; she doesn’t want us to say, “Oh, that play was so well-made.” It’s like it got out of control. It’s like Ibsen just let it break itself. Why did he build something just so it could destroy itself from the inside? (a slight pause) If you’re a robot and you figure out you’re a robot, are you still a robot? Who do you become? (a slight pause) I don’t know. Also I brought blow-pops.”

// Sound Affects

"Her debut album is a post-rock full-fledged opera about a mountain climber from the 1800s. In short, welcome to the fabulous world of Missy Mazzoli, one of the single most promising musicians out there today (she's also got a story about a Frankensteined accordion, too).